The Kerner Commission Report

Welcome to our
panel discussion on the 30th anniversary of the publication of the
Kerner Commission Report.

The Heritage Foundation has a number of goals. One is to roll
back the liberal welfare state. A prerequisite to understanding
what happened to create the liberal welfare state, and to
accomplishing the goal of rolling it back, is understanding the
liberal welfare state itself, its origins, and the thinking that
led to its creation. There's no better place to start than by
closely examining the so-called Kerner Commission -- its history, its
recommended policies, and its recommended solutions -- and by
honestly evaluating how these policies have fared, 30 years
later.

In
August 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Kerner
Commission, which was named after its chairman, Illinois governor
Otto Kerner. Eight months later, in March 1968, the commission
submitted a 426-page report that, interestingly, became a best
seller with over 2 million copies sold. Looking back on the Kerner
Commission, it resembles a Who's Who of liberal elites back then,
including New York mayor John Lindsay, Roy Wilkins of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored people, and Oklahoma
populist senator Fred Harris.

The
Kerner Commission is known best for its conclusion that the United
States is moving toward two societies -- one black, one white;
separate and unequal. The report looks into the causes of the many
urban riots and concludes, "White racism is essentially responsible
for the explosive mixture that has been accumulating in our Cities
since the end of World War II." The report also concludes that a
massive redistribution of income had to take place to remedy this
problem. It also suggests the addition of 1 million
government-created jobs, the institution of a higher minimum wage,
significantly increasing welfare benefits, spending more money on
education and housing, and so on.

Three themes emerge from the Kerner
Commission Report, which our panelists today are uniquely qualified
to address. The first is the condition of race relations and the
condition of racial minorities in the United States. The second is
the success or failure of the social policies advocated by the
commission and other liberals during those years. The third is
alternatives to those policies that promised to improve the lives
of our poorer citizens and revive our communities -- inner Cities
especially.

First, you will hear from Stephan
Thernstrom. He and his wife, Abigail, recently co-wrote a
monumental work on race relations in the United States today:
America in Black and White. Thernstrom is an award-winning
professor of history at Harvard University, editor of the Harvard
Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups as well as many other
books.

Our
second panelist is Fred Siegel, who recently wrote an excellent
book that analyzes the negative effects of liberal social policies
in three major U.S. Cities: New York, Washington, D.C., and Los
Angeles. Professor Siegel's book is The Future Once Happened Here.
A native New Yorker, Professor Siegel teaches at Cooper Union for
the Arts and Sciences in Manhattan. He's a senior fellow at the
Progressive Policy Institute, and used to work as an editor at
Descent and City Journal; he also formerly was a columnist for the
New York Post.

Our
third panelist is Robert Woodson, a pioneer in encouraging
non-governmental, faith-based solutions to the social problems that
the Great Society and its many programs have failed to address. Mr.
Woodson recently published an excellent compilation of his work and
his vision of how to overcome the forces that dragged down so many
of our citizens: The Triumphs of Joseph.

The Kerner
Commission Report Lacks Credibility
By Stephan Thernstrom

In
the quarter-century between the entry of the United States into
World War II and the Voting rights Act of 1965, the position of
black people in the United States radically improved more than in
any other comparably brief period in U.S. history. The possible
exception of this would be the Civil War and Reconstruction years.
By the mid-1960s, the civil rights revolution in the United States
had accomplished its original goal, the destruction of the legal
foundations of the Jim Crow system. The 1964 Civil rights Act and
its companion piece, the 1965 Voting rights Act, marked the end of
that long road.

These measures applied nationally, but
there were no serious barriers to black voting in any northern
state; most northern states with significant black populations
already had their own laws barring discrimination in employment,
education, and public accommodations.

Federal law might be enforced more
vigorously, but solid majorities of northern whites believed
discrimination was wrong and should be illegal. By 1965, a rapidly
growing minority of southern whites was coming around to that view
as well. Racism and discrimination had not disappeared from the
land, obviously, but legal barriers to black advancement had been
destroyed, and the remaining obstacles seemed impervious to attack
through protest marches and non-violent resistance. That is what
the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., meant when he said in early
August 1965, "There is no more civil rights movement. President
Johnson signed it out of existence when he signed the voting rights
bill."

Obviously, the civil rights movement did
not go out of existence. Instead, most civil rights leaders
redefined their objectives and abandoned their long commitment to
the principle that, as John F. Kennedy had put it, "Race has no
place in American life and American law." Civil rights leaders
began to argue that African-Americans had been denied their "fair
share" of income, wealth, good jobs, political offices, and seats
in institutions of higher learning, and that the only effective
remedies were racially preferential policies. The riots that
erupted across the land between 1965 and 1968 were part of the
explanation for this transformation. Dr. King spoke on the eve of
the great riot that exploded in the Watts section of Los Angeles on
August 11,1965. Over the next three years, by one count, 329
"important" racial disturbances took place in 257 Cities, resulting
in nearly 300 deaths, 8,000 injuries, 60,000 arrests, and property
losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

With
so many Cities in flames, many Americans were persuaded that
extraordinary measures were necessary to restore civic peace. The
official analysis of these disturbances by the body President
Johnson appointed to investigate them -- the Kerner
Commission -- blamed them on persisting "white racism," and argued
that riots would become a regular feature of urban life unless the
federal government launched massive programs to ensure black
progress. Both the diagnosis and the proposed remedies were highly
dubious, but they established the liberal orthodoxy on racial
issues for a generation. Even before the pervasive mood of panicked
impatience created by the riots and reflected in the Kerner Report,
liberal thinking about racial policy had taken a momentous turn.
Two Johnson Administration documents that appeared months before
the Watts riots -- the March 1965 Moynihan Report and President
Johnson's Howard University speech the following June -- departed
strikingly from the original civil rights vision.

The
Moynihan Report, officially a Department of Labor report on "The
Negro family: The Case for National Action," was prescient in
identifying the disintegration of the black family as the chief
source of the social problems afflicting African-Americans. It was
savagely denounced for "blaming the victim," and its author was
called a racist by many that should have known better. The assault
had the tragic effect of deterring all public discussion of the
black family until quite recently, despite steadily mounting
evidence that the skyrocketing rate of out-of-wedlock births (now
at a horrendous 70 percent) and the prevalence of female-headed
households is closely linked to educational failure, crime, and
other pathologies.

Despite all the furor over the alleged
"conservatism" of the Moynihan Report, it started from radical
premises that quickly were echoed by civil rights activists. The
opening pages of the report rejected the traditional ideal of equal
opportunity as the goal in favor of equality of results for racial
and ethnic groups. Now that the "demand of Negro Americans for full
recognition of their civil rights" had been met, Moynihan wrote,
the "expectations" of African-Americans inevitably and properly
would move "beyond civil rights." "The evolution of American
politics" had "added a profoundly significant new dimension" to the
"traditional egalitarian ideal." This "new dimension" was the
expectation of blacks that "in the near future equal opportunities
for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared
with other groups." Without "equality of results," there would be
"no social peace in the United States for generations."

Although Moynihan had collaborated with
Nathan Glaser in writing Beyond the Melting Pot, published only two
years earlier, his report endorses a utopian aim that never could
be fully realized in the ethnically complex society portrayed in
that volume. Beyond the Melting Pot shows that the Irish, Italians,
and Jews of New York all climbed out of poverty and made
socioeconomic progress since their initial arrival, but certainly
not that all three groups achieved "roughly equal results" in
occupations, incomes, rates of college attendance, or any other
measure of social status. And the blacks and Puerto Ricans of the
city lagged far behind them, and were not on a trajectory that
would bring them socioeconomic equality "in the near future."

Moynihan claims that achieving "equal
results" is "what ethnic politics are all about in America, and in
the main the Negro American demands are being put forth in this now
traditional and established framework." (This, of course, is very
difficult to reconcile with his insistence that a "profoundly
significant new dimension" had been added to the American
"egalitarian ideal." How could equal results for groups
simultaneously be a part of both the "traditional and established
framework" and a "profoundly significant" innovation?) His
scholarly work with Glaser certainly does not demonstrate that
traditional "ethnic politics" has brought about equal results for
groups; to the contrary, Moynihan preserves a little wiggle room
for himself by specifying that the results for groups need be only
roughly equal, but it takes a really broad definition of "roughly"
to square with the inter-group socioeconomic differences so evident
in Beyond the Melting Pot.

President Johnson's June 1965 speech at
Howard University built upon this line of argument, not
surprisingly in light of the fact that Moynihan was its principal
author. The freedom recently extended to African-Americans, said
Johnson, was "not enough": It was "not enough just to open the
gates of opportunity"; it was necessary to make sure that all had
the "ability to walk through those gates." The goal was "not just
equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and a
result."

The
most powerful and oft-quoted passage in the Howard University
speech is

You
do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and
liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then
say "you are free to compete with all theothers," and still justly
believe that you have been completely fair.

This
was the central argument in favor of remedial racial preferences.
As Shelby Steele has pointed out, it reeks of condescending
paternalism. The black subjects of this sentence are passive and
helpless, who can hardly walk, much less run, because of the chains
whites had put them in. What whites had done, only other (more
benevolent) whites could undo.

The
ideas that equal outcome for groups, rather than equal opportunity
for individuals, is the goal; that blacks are too crippled to
compete on equal terms with whites; and that all social problems in
the black community are the result of white racism past or present
thus all received official sanction by Johnson Administration
officials before Watts exploded in August 1965. Appearing three
years later, the Kerner Report interpreted the riots as evidence of
the truth of these assumptions.

This
is not the place to criticize the work of the Kerner Commission in
detail, a task Abigail and I take up in our recent volume, America
in Black and White. Suffice it to say that the report does not
satisfactorily answer the elementary question of why the riots
occurred when and where they did. Because the commission took for
granted that the riots were the fault of white racism, it would
have been awkward to have had to confront the question of why
liberal Detroit blew up while Birmingham and other southern
cities -- where conditions for blacks were infinitely worse -- did not.
Likewise, if the problem was white racism, why didn't the riots
occur in the 1930s, when prevailing white racial attitudes were far
more barbaric than they were in the 1960s?

Although its analysis is deeply flawed,
the Kerner Commission was a great success -- if we measure success in
terms of how many people have subsequently referred to it as if it
had biblical authority. The commission was wildly mistaken in its
claims that the socioeconomic condition of black America was
deteriorating, and that the country was splitting into "two
societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." Even more
mistaken have been the pessimists who continue to claim, despite
superabundant evidence to the contrary, that "almost every problem
defined by the Kerner Commission has become worse." To deny the
dramatic progress in the status of African-Americans and in race
relations that has been achieved in the past 30 years is perverse
and dangerous.

-- Stephan Thernstrom is Winthrop Professor
of history at Harvard University.

THE KERNER COMMISSION REPORT DID MORE HARM
THAN GOOD
By Fred Siegel

The
man I want to speak about today is a ghost. It's often said during
the debates of the Constitutional Convention that the man who
wasn't there helped write the convention letter; the ghost of
Oliver Cromwell was riding through the debates. John Lindsay's
ghost rides through these debates. John Lindsay is now a
much-forgotten man. When Nora Sayer recently re-issued her
collection of essays, Going on 60s and 70s, which was a very
popular essay collection 25 years ago, she dropped all the Lindsay
essays, which in the first edition comprised about one-sixth of the
book.

I
ran into Sayer recently at a party, and I asked her why. She said
that no one knows who John Lindsay is anymore. I told her,
"Actually, people don't know, but wouldn't it be nice if they
did -- you know, if they learned something about him?" Sayer just
laughed and continued on. I think it was wise on her part. It
wouldn't fit with the theme of the rest of the book, but just to
close the circle on this opening thought, it's important for you to
know that John Lindsay's hero was Cromwell. He brought a crusade
and a little bit of what Professor Thernstrom was talking about -- a
crusading, moralizing spirit -- to policy.

Why
is Lindsay important? It's not just that he was the primary author
of the Kerner Commission Report, or that he was the driving force
behind it; it's that he was the one who actually put these policies
in place in one city. When I hear the mantra, the every-ten-year
mantra Professor Thernstrom talks about -- "if only we had done these
things" -- I know these things were done. They were done in one
city -- my city -- New York. I should tell you, just as background,
that I live in an integrated neighborhood in Brooklyn. I like it. I
love cities. The reason I'm interested in this is because I was
very unhappy to see what was happening to my city, and to other
cities.

It's
difficult to overestimate how much influence Lindsay had on the
1960s. He was on the cover of Time and Newsweek. He was very
handsome, very photogenic -- and not very bright. When you run into
people from the Lindsay Administration, many of whom have had
second thoughts, the conversation can quickly turn to the question
of which was the bigger Lindsay disaster: The welfare explosion or
the battle of Ocean Hill-Brownsville? Let me talk about these two
because they are the two moments in which Lindsay attempted to put
into practice the logic of what the Kerner Commission report
represented.

The
first was the welfare explosion in 1965. New York City had a black
male unemployment rate of 4 percent. We were in the midst of the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history. The city was thriving. Five
years later, there were 600,000 more people on welfare. Now, this
was a tragedy in many ways, especially for the city's
African-Americans. They were on the up escalator of jobs and
participation in the economy, but they were pulled off the up
escalator and shunted off into welfare. The effect on the city was
twofold: Fiscal calamity and family breakdown. It's fascinating
that this policy was specifically chosen.

In
"Broken Cities: Liberalism's Urban Legacy" in the March-April 1998
issue of Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship, Steven
Hayward quotes an infamous New York City welfare commissioner whom
The New York Daily News dubs "Come and Get It Ginsburg." The city
actually was advertising for people to come on to welfare. What was
the logic? It was the logic of the Kerner Commission Report. It was
the sense that African-Americans were so damaged that what they
needed was not help making it into society, but a respite from
society; in effect, they should be pensioned off.

people sometimes argue that this welfare
explosion was the price of good intentions. Nonsense. The theorists
behind this movement are two people named Piven and Cloward, who
are still alive. It's difficult to imagine how they get through the
day knowing what they did, but they seem to do it. One's at
Columbia University, and other is at City University of New York.
Their logic is that, if you expanded the welfare role sufficiently,
you would bankrupt the city, force a political crisis, and set
people at each other's throats. The idea was that New York was at a
median point, so if New York exploded like this, then the rest of
the country would have to respond. Well, they succeeded in part.
people were at each other's throats, and the city did go
bankrupt.

You
simply can't add that many people to welfare. This is difficult to
imagine, but in1965, New York was not a particularly high-tax
place. I don't mean that we were ever low. We taxed all sorts of
things that no one else would think of taxing, such as moving vans.
But we weren't off the charts. Five years later, however, we were
off the charts, and the city's economy was heading straight
downhill. That's one disaster, a disaster for which we really
haven't fully recovered even today. people talk about the drop in
welfare rolls under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It's true, but we are
back only to 1989 levels.

The
second disaster was the creation of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
school district. What ties these two disasters together is the
sense that Mayor Lindsay held strongly that rural immigrants with
semi-literate pasts, without any skills in an urban economy, had
nothing whatsoever in common with earlier immigrants. Now, the
argument that blacks were just like immigrants of old was wrong.
But the sense that they were completely different from immigrants
of old is also wrong. people coming from rural backgrounds without
the kinds of academic skills you needed to make it into the economy
need to be acculturated.

New
York's schools, like those in Washington, D.C., at the time, were
integrationist in their ideology, and both were judged highly
successful using a contemporary standard. That model was destroyed
in the name of a kind of multiculturalism. And what happened at
Ocean Hill-Brownsville was a conflict so intense, so vicious, so
hostile, over black separatism in the schools that the people in
the city were literally at each other's throats.

Let
me tell you what happened, and I'll tell you how Jason Epstein, one
of the resident geniuses at the New York Review of Books described
it. There was broad support in New York for decentralization. Once
Tammany Hall was gone, there was no way to access government
horizontally. From the 1940s, Ed Costikyan, one of the city's
wisemen, was able to build broad support for decentralization.
Unfortunately, the first attempt at large-scale decentralization
occurred around schooling, and it intersected with the rise of
black nationalism. The New York teachers union turned into the kind
of time-serving, self-interested bureaucracy people claim it is,
but it had not reached that point yet in those days. The teachers
union had been active in the civil rights movement and had
supported even decentralization.

Despite this, Mayor Lindsay double-crossed
the union. He brought in McGeorge Bundy, fresh from Vietnam, even
though he knew very little about Vietnam or the Vietnamese. He also
knew very little about New York City, eastern New York State, or
black Americans. That didn't stop him. Nation-building had failed
in Vietnam, but he was determined to make it succeed in eastern New
York State. He also was going to impose an essentially black
nationalist regime on the schools in New York City through a man
named Rhody McCoy, now forgotten even to New Yorkers who follow
these things. He ended up as a professor, fittingly enough in the
education department of the University of Massachusetts.

Essentially, decentralization got hijacked
and, without stretching, it was taken over by thugs. There was a
lot of violence; teachers were threatened; blacks and Jews were at
each other's throats. It was right after the Six Day War: Jews were
feeling newly empowered, and these two groups clashed.

Jason Epstein went to McCoy to tell him
that, at that point, the city had two choices, that is, it could
restore the teachers to that school district either by
"exterminating every black in New York City or by capitulating
entirely." Now, neither of those things happened, fortunately, but
neither did the schools ever recover. One of the great economic
mechanisms of New York, and one of the great civic mechanisms for
integrating people into the larger society -- integrating them into
the economy -- was destroyed, and it has never been repaired. It's
constantly reexamining itself and reshaping itself. It's like
Soviet-era agriculture: It's constantly reforming itself, but never
succeeding.

So,
I would suggest that in New York we actually see the Kerner
Commission played out on the ground. In the one case, welfare
replaced work for low-income people who were ready to move up the
job ladder. In another case, race became the central factor of the
curriculum (and the only factor of curriculum in Ocean
Hill-Brownsville).

One
final point on Mayor Lindsay: His authority to lead the Kerner
Commission was due to the fact that his city was the one that had
not burned. You will recall that New York City had only minor
disturbances that didn't fit the official qualifications the Kerner
Commission Report had laid out. Having been there, however, and
having been in some of them, it was hard for me to tell the
difference. As a personal note, I was in the Newark riots, the
Pittsburgh riots, and the more recent Crown Heights and Washington
Heights riots, and I was in some riots in New York City in those
periods that did not qualify by the Kerner Commission standards but
that didn't look very different to me.

I
would suggest that part of this reputation is undeserved, but not
exactly in that way. It was undeserved in the sense that the
measures Mayor Lindsay took to keep the lid on were as
destructive -- if not more destructive -- to the city than the riots
themselves because they caused financial bankruptcy and the
destruction of the school system. That is the legacy of the Kerner
Commission in New York City.

-- Fred Siegel is Senior Fellow at the
Progressive Policy Institute.

DIFFERENT CAUSES OF poverty REQUIRE
DIFFERENT SOLUTIONS
By Robert Woodson, Sr.

Like
others on this panel, I, too, was a liberal Democrat. Michael Novak
recently described a neo-conservative as a progressive with two
teenage daughters. I guess having teenagers really alters one's
view of the world -- even one's politics and philosophy.

I am
a product of the civil rights movement, having led demonstrations
in the 1960s. I left the movement -- or, rather, the movement left
me -- over three issues. One was forced bussing for integration. I
fought against segregation. The opposite of segregation is
desegregation with the goal of pluralism, not forced integration.
Integration was a matter of choice. I also parted with the movement
on the issue of affirmative action when the goal of equal
opportunity became a demand for equal results. I fought for an
equal opportunity to compete, not a guaranteed percentage of the
trophies. When I found that the plight of poor blacks was being
sacrificed on the altar of civil rights, that's when I left the
movement permanently and began to embrace a much larger agenda to
empower those who had been left behind.

On
October 25, 1965, a very revealing article by William Raspberry,
who then was a reporter for The Washington Post, was published with
the headline; "Poor Negroes Are Not Benefiting from the Civil
rights Gains." Continued emphasis on political participation and
race-specific remedies would not benefit those who were most in
need. We needed to focus on strengthening those who had been
prepared least to walk through the doors of opportunity.

Martin Luther King constantly challenged
conventional wisdom and the consensus of the majority. Dr. King's
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" had a powerful influence on me. He
said that the greatest stumbling block to black progress is not the
White Citizens Council or the Ku Klux Klan, but the white
moderates' acquiescence that lukewarm acceptance from those of good
will is more difficult to tolerate than outright hostility of those
who harbor ill will. He was talking about patronizing policies. Dr.
King asked, "What good does it do to have the right to sleep in a
hotel or to live in a neighborhood if you don't have the economic
means to exercise that right?" He died assisting people to attain
the means to exercise those rights by accumulation of wealth and
achieving economic self-sufficiency. It is with this point that my
life's goal changed.

I
also would like to reflect on some points that I discuss in my
recent book, The Triumphs of Joseph. It is interesting that, when
the civil rights movement emerged, racial discrimination was
affecting all blacks in the same way. At that time, you could talk
about the "black community" as a single entity. Once the Civil
rights Act was passed, that situation changed. No longer did all
blacks suffer equally; those who were equipped to take advantage of
opportunities could advance. There was a rich tradition of economic
development and self-sufficiency among free blacks even during
slavery. It is interesting, however, that the advocates of civil
rights had to abandon publications that discussed the strength of
black communities in order for them to have civil rights laws
applied to them. With these demands, we entered a "grievance
period" in which we reported only on our shortcomings and our
failings. This had devastating results on attitudes and goals. In
addition, the civil rights movement was incubated in the same womb
as the poverty movement. Therefore, the moral authority of one was
extended to the other. Criticizing poverty programs meant being
called a racist. It legitimized a victim mentality and undermined a
spirit of self-help and personal responsibility.

As
we conducted interviews among many older blacks who were active in
the business arena, we found that 68 percent of those blacks who
are second-generation college graduates were born into
entrepreneurial households. These were the people that had nice
houses, small businesses, and barber shops. These entrepreneurs
tended to convey the importance of education to their children.
Unfortunately, this entrepreneurial legacy was abandoned by black
leaders in the 1940s and 1950s. As a consequence, there was a rapid
decline in the entrepreneurial activity within the black community.
Our history of success was lost, and we took on the role of victims
to racism who were trapped in poverty. Personal incentive to escape
the situation was dead.

If
economic conditions and race were the sole predictors of outcomes
in the black community, then why was it possible during the Great
Depression that 82 percent of black families had both fathers and
mothers raising their children? Current economic conditions are
nothing in comparison with those of the Depression, during which
time there was negative growth in gross national product with an
overall unemployment rate of 25 percent for all Americans. This
meant an unemployment rate of about 40 percent for blacks. This was
also a time in which blacks had neither political representation
nor judicial representation. Worst of all, they were being lynched
every day. Despite these odds, they achieved and maintained strong
family units. In 1863, when 1,000 blacks were fired from the docks
of Baltimore, people did not march on Washington, D.C., demanding
jobs, peace, and freedom. Instead, they established the Chesapeake
Man Drydock and Railroad Company, which operated successfully for
18 years.

Revisionist history has been communicated
to our young people. When I spoke to 200 black MBAs from the finest
graduate schools in this country, I learned that not a single one
knew anything of the rich entrepreneurial past of black Americans.
Consequently, there has been an ascendance of a leadership class
within the black community that is grievance-oriented. There are
many middle-income blacks who have a proprietary interest in the
grievances of the black community. The poverty industry has joined
forces with the race-grievance industry, and together they suppress
reform that could have the power to uplift those low-income people
in the black communities.

In
order for us to embrace an agenda that truly empowers people, we
must stop this bait-and-switch game in which conditions of the poor
are used to justify preferences for all blacks. When the remedies
are designed on the basis of race alone, they primarily benefit
those in the upper classes. The greatest income gap today is not
between the white community and the black community; it is between
low-income blacks and upper-income blacks. Sociologist Robert B.
Hill conducted a study, "The Strength of African American
Families," which reveals that, between 1970 and 1990, the number of
black families with incomes between $35,000 and $75,000 grew 200
percent. Black families with incomes exceeding $75,000 increased
300 percent in number. Unfortunately, the number of black families
with incomes below the poverty level also expanded 150 percent.

If
we are to address the problems that low-income blacks face, we must
move beyond race to embrace policies that change the rules of the
game. It is not the sex or race of the ruler that determines who
wins and who loses in the marketplace; it is the rules of the game.
Those who are in the race- and poverty-grievance industries fail to
explain or answer some troubling questions. For example, if racism
is the primary cause of inequalities, then why are black children
failing in systems run by their own people? Why is it that, in 15
separate categories of poverty expenditures, Washington, D.C.,
leads the country, spending about $9,000 per student in education,
yet Washington, D.C., is dead last when it comes to the academic
performance of its students? A Harvard study reveals that a black
child born in Washington, D.C., today has a life expectancy 15
years lower than a child born just across the river in Virginia.
The life expectancy of a black boy born in Washington, D.C., is
exceeded by a child born in Haiti, a country with the lowest life
expectancy in the Western Hemisphere. This is a time in which
blacks are running the school system, the foster care systems, and
the failing housing programs. Yet, at the same time, middle- and
upper-income blacks living in Washington, D.C., are prospering. The
ranks of that group have exploded. We have an unfortunate situation
in which there are perverse incentives to maintain classes of
people in poverty. Still, we are prevented from addressing this
situation because, whenever criticism is valid, an issue is raised
to prevent us from engaging in thoughtful debate and
discussion.

The
National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise focuses on remedies and
recognizes that we must move to a different paradigm that goes
beyond a Left and a Right. The Left believes that all you have to
do is spend more money on affirmative action and poverty programs.
We reject that notion. We also reject the strategies of some on the
Right, however, that believe that all we must do is cut those
programs. I call them cheap Democrats and cheap liberals because
they are not offering a different approach. Let us begin to
redirect our focus of attention and look for remedies among the
people suffering the problems.

In
truth, we cannot generalize about the conditions of any race of
people, whether they are black, white, or Hispanic. When we were
involved in a racially segregated society, we may have been able to
generalize, but we cannot do that now. I was on the Jim Lehrer
NewsHour one time with Maralee Evers, an architect that made a
million dollars a year, and John Jacobs of the Urban League. Lehrer
asked me, "What is the state of black America?" I answered, "For
those on the panel, life ain't bad. Our income has not gone down in
the past 20 years regardless of which white man was in the White
House."

Although we must stop generalizing about
blacks, we still are able to generalize about poor people with
dysfunctional families. Yet, even in the case of poor people, we
should make a distinctive difference between those who are poor
because they lack opportunity and need only a job and affordable
housing and those people who are poor because of their character
and the choices they made. For the latter, we must embrace a
different kind of intervention.

The
"Josephs" of this world are people living in those impoverished
neighborhoods who themselves have been broken but continued to
embrace a faith in God. It is they who have emerged victorious;
they became character tutors and moral counselors to others. As a
consequence, they help the people they serve to change their own
lives. They become healthy, whole, and "work-ready" people by
changing their own values. The crisis we face is primarily a
cultural crisis; therefore, we must monetarily and verbally support
those Josephs who represent healing agents in these neighborhoods.
Once men, women, and young people are called to responsibility,
they will be able to take advantage of jobs, education, and
housing.

Recently, U.S. News & World Report
published a four-page spread of one such grassroots effort that we
support in Benning Terrace, a neighborhood in Southeast Washington,
D.C., that at one time was overrun with violence and drugs. At one
time, it was one of the most dangerous communities in the country.
Since the arrival of the grassroots healers, called the Alliance of
Concerned Men, who guided warring factions through a peace
agreement, there has not been a single death in the neighborhood in
which violence had once claimed the life of one young person each
month. Ever since the truce was established at Benning Terrace, we
have received 14 requests from young people throughout the District
of Columbia who want to bring an end to the violence in their
neighborhoods. They have begun to ask how people achieve in spite
of poverty, and how we can invest in those people to achieve
further success. We should look to those who have achieved success
in those inner-city environments and study what they did.

I
challenge both conservative and liberal scholars, who are able to
make their reputations and careers without ever studying a single
poor person. That must change. We need to move away from bipolar
ideological debates and direct our energies toward low-income
healing agents. We should go into these low-income neighborhoods
and begin to inquire as to how many people living in these
communities are raising children who are not dropping out of school
or using drugs and going to jail. We also must ask them how they
are able to achieve in that environment.

Any
time we say, "60 percent of households are generating teen
mothers," that means the other 40 percent are not. I do not see,
however, scholars rushing in there to ask, "What is happening with
the other 40 percent?" and "What are they doing that works?" We
have much to learn from these "Josephs" from which we can begin to
construct policies.

Unfortunately, a very cynical view about
poor people prevails. The greatest barrier that the poor face is
not racism; it is elitism. We assume that poverty makes people not
only frustrated and dispirited, but also stupid. Therefore, we
refuse to inquire among the Josephs of this world what it is they
are doing. It is critical that we seek out strategies that will get
beyond the deadlock of today's current debate. The crisis we face
as a country is fundamentally spiritual, and its answer lies in
supporting the moral centers of influence that exist in our
communities.

Today's moral crisis is not just a problem
of the inner city. In Fairfax County, Virginia -- one of the most
affluent communities in the metropolitan Washington, D.C.,
area -- affluent teenage children from two-parent households are
experiencing the same kind of crisis of spiritual emptiness that we
are seeing in the inner city. As a result, drug addiction is up,
drug sales continue to rise, theft rings are being organized, and
gang violence is rampant, as they are in many suburban communities.
At this critical time, our attention should be focused on the moral
and spiritual freefall in which we find ourselves and searching for
remedies to this ever-apparent crisis. The byproducts of spiritual
revitalization will be racial reconciliation. With this in mind, it
still is important to realize that racial reconciliation will not
yield moral and spiritual rejuvenation.

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